The SSRC is an independent, international, nonprofit organization. It fosters innovative research, nurtures new generations of social scientists, deepens how inquiry is practiced within and across disciplines, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues.

Jooyoung Lee

Jooyoung Lee is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Toronto. He is also a faculty member in the Centre for the Study of the United States at the Munk School of Global Affairs, an international scholar in the University of Pennsylvania Injury Science Center, and a Senior Fellow in the Yale University Urban Ethnography Project. His first book, Blowin' Up: Rap Dreams in South Central (University of Chicago Press, 2016) won the 2018 Charles Cooley Book Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. He is currently finishing a new book, Ricochet: Surviving Gun Violence in Killadelphia, which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. In addition to academic writing, Lee has also published articles in the New York Times, VICE, Maclean's, Toronto Star, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is also a recipient of the Oswald Hall Award for teaching excellence at the University of Toronto. When he is not doing research, he teaches and trains Brazilian jiujitsu.

Posts created

0

Posts liked

In his “Understanding Gun Violence” series contribution, Jooyoung Lee poses the question: “What might gun violence research look like if we centered our analysis on victims?” In addressing the matter, he focuses on ethnographic approaches and the concept of “social loss” that extends beyond individual victims to a whole range of effects on families and neighborhoods. Drawing on his own extensive research in Philadelphia, Lee engages with victims as they move from the hospital to their homes and communities. In one instance, the connection between pain management due to gun violence and the opioid crisis becomes clear.

“Sociolinguistic Frontiers” was inspired by a September 2018 Itemsessay by Monica Heller that reflected on the history, influence, and limits of the SSRC’s Committee on Sociolinguistics in the 1960s and 1970s, based in part on her research in the SSRC archives. The essay argued that the Committee, a product of its time and place during the Cold War and the growth of US global power, privileged some key topics, questions, and approaches to the relationship between language and culture while downplaying others. Notably, less attention was paid to questions of power and conflict than might have been the case for a discipline focused on social variation in communicative form and practice.

With Prof. Heller on board to help curate this new series with the Items editorial team, we are publishing a series of essays in “Sociolinguistic Frontiers” by a variety of scholars of different generations and areas of interest. In this series, they reflect on the trajectory of the field of sociolinguistics from the end of Committee’s work to today, drawing on new research approaches and questions not addressed by the Committee or not even conceived at the time, as well as ongoing debates within the field. These essays reflect on the present state and possible futures of sociolinguistics both in the United States and beyond.

How does contemporary capitalism, and the inequalities it produces, intersect with race? How does race, and the process of racialization, itself shape economic processes and the nature of work? And, how does the entanglement of racialization and capitalism affect politics and power dynamics—in the United States, but also globally? This Items series, a second collaboration with the multi-institutional Race and Capitalism project, includes contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars to address the relationship between racial and economic inequality, the potentials and limits of resistance and reform efforts to redress inequalities, historical and contemporary transformations in the relationship between race and capitalism, and theoretical perspectives that best make sense of the current moment.

Michael Dawson of the University of Chicago, codirector of the Race and Capitalism project, joins the Items editors in curating this discussion.